Hello to ProcessWire

[raydale]

Hello ProcessWire community and Ryan Cramer in particular.

I have been using the various open source and proprietary CMS's for over 10 years now. I can quite honestly say that ProcessWire is - for me - one of the most exciting open-source projects I have ever seen. Thank you for your work Ryan!

I only stumbled across the ProcessWire framework a couple of days ago via a mention here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3447386 This is a thread that echoed a lot of my personal discontent with WordPress and Drupal in general and as a result I've decided to update my badly out of date portfolio site using PW just to learn the system (I was going to use WordPress).

Having only really started using the system 2 days I can honestly say - so far so good. I love the way that (to my mind) some of the better features of Drupal, WordPress and ModX have been all wrapped into a very light and approachable core framework. However, for me - as a designer - the most important facet is the powerful and flexible core that doesn't write XHTML markup for me!!!

I really like WordPress and Drupal - they are great systems and I use them for clients regularly. However, Drupal assumes it knows better than me and writes my markup for me; expecting me to build tons of inflexible overrides to tell it to stop and do what I ask! WordPress is amazing - with tons of usability, it gets out of my way enough to give me the illusion that I'm in control, but it's always going to be a focused blogging framework with the more flexible CMS features being second priority strategically.

I have high hopes with PW and love the rounded philosophy and structure behind it.

I'll let you know how I get on and please accept my apologies for any dumb questions in advance.

[Pete]

Welcome to ProcessWire

I'll start off by saying that my only role here is administrating the forums, so I don't speak in an official ProcessWire capacity. With that bit out of the way, I can't say I agree with everything in the article those comments are attached to as they're mostly the result of trying to bend a blogging system to do something that it's not designed for, but I did move a website to ProcessWire a few weeks back because of the regular admin changes and what I personally see as inflexibility in the templates. I think my problem was that each time I checked out Wordpress (probably 6-9 months unless I was applying an update to that particular site) there seemed to be just enough changes to confuse me (esasily confused). If I was using it day in and day out it probably wouldn't have been a problem if I'm totally honest with myself.

I know part of runing a website for a client is keeping on top of updates, but I wanted a system that was simple to patch (in the case of ProcessWire I've recently learned that you can run multiple sites from the same core files, so there would only be one /site directory to update for all sites - something that I find quite exciting ).

I came to PW from a MODx perspective, and much as I loved MODx and the way it tried to keep things tidy with the use of snippets and chunks as well as prevent PHP in templates with it's tagging system, I was converted primarily by the jQuery-inspired API and also when I read Ryan's article on syntax and finally wrapped my head around the idea that a Page in ProcessWire is whatever you want it to be.

Following on from that last statement, one of my plans for this year is to build a fairly complex file download repository in PW. I looked at all manner of scripts for that task last year, and when I'd been using ProcessWire for a month or two this year I thought to myself "how hard would it be to build such a system in PW?". The more I thought about it, the more things clicked into place in my head and now, rather than trying to make two separate programs work together - and the invevitable issues with any third-party file download script not having all the fields I might want - I can do it all in one system and what's more I'm pretty sure I could build it over the course of a few weekends.

The thing that I quickly learned is that the majority of what I want to do can be done in ProcessWire. The majority of the functionality I requested early on, Ryan had actually already built and it was just a case of knowing the API functions (Soma's PW cheatsheet is invaluable once you've learned the basics), and there are exciting things on the roadmap such as multi-content fields and a page workflow are on the roadmap.

I think the biggest thing that keeps me coming back here though is that every suggestion you make is considered and everyone is friendly as well. It's not something I've encountered much before, and in some cases (not going to name the software) when I've constructively suggested things on other CMS forums I've actually felt likve I've been jumped on and told to contribute if I want a feature. Not everyone is a good programmer, but I think everyone can have good ideas and certainly provide valuable suggestions and feedback, often leading to Ryan putting a feature on teh roadmap or in the case of really good ideas implementing the code into the latest build seemingly overnight, and I think that sort of relationship is what makes this community really work.

Have fun with ProcessWire - I know I do

Oh, and there's no such thing as a dumb question - every CMS has a learning curve.

[apeisa]

raydale: welcome to the forums. Always glad to have experienced cms users in to the community. The more you will use PW the more and more you will love it. I have actually found that many times I think that something have to be impossible or very difficult, because my experience with other cms have taught me to think that way. One post here on the forums and solution is probably under 5 lines of code

That is actually very interesting topic you linked. so I'll continue reading it, thanks for sharing.

[raydale]

@Pete: thanks for your detailed response and the welcome.

It's interesting for me to see someone here from using ModX as the hierarchical paradigm seems similar to PW. Revo seems extremely powerful and the template system nicely flexible, but I decided to wait until they had ironed out the usability of the admin interface before spending too much time on it. For me ModX is definitely one to watch though.

Wow! I am just discovering the beauty of the jQuery style syntax. As mentioned I originally gravitated towards PW because of the flexible fields structure and lack of markup enforced on the user. The jQuery syntax has added another reason to enjoy using PW. That's quite a master stroke I think, as most developers & designers on the web understand and appreciate jQuery. It makes the whole system very much more accessible.

I agree that a lot of the comments in the article (and others on forums discussing the same storm) are expecting a lot from WordPress who's origins are in blogging. However, some of the discontent is related to the fact that WordPress does often tout itself as a fully fledged CMS. It nearly is, but obviously focuses on bloggers first and therefore some of the finer CMS points get overlooked (such as really fine grained user access capabilities for example).

It's good to hear about the proactive development going on with PW. Some of the other systems out there tend to disregard requests for features or help from users in the community until you have earned a certain status.

@Apeisa: Thanks for the welcome. A lot of my experience with other systems is very much from a designers perspective and I still feel like a complete idiot with a lot of them. I agree that once you use other systems you become channelled into a certain way of doing things. Those channels often lead to dead ends because of the approach you have to take and you quickly end up with horrible workarounds.

Glad you liked the article - it was very useful to me and pointed me to here in the first place. However, you have to keep an open mind as some of the strong opinions on what are not possible with other certain systems are quite often very inaccurate.

[ryan]

Welcome Raydale and thanks for using ProcessWire and joining the forums. I'm late to this conversation--just arrived back in town after being gone for a couple of days. I think Pete and Apeisa replied better than I could have, and just wanted to say we're glad to have you here and look forward to talking more.

[raydale]

Thanks Ryan, I look forward to using ProcessWire and hopefully having something useful to contribute.

Congratulations on a great CMS too.